Editorial Notebook; Homeboy With a 'Y'

By BRENT STAPLES

Published: September 26, 1990

Terry, a 15-year-old cocaine dealer in New Haven, was a young man of means. When it came time to march in the parade that was an annual ritual in black New Haven, he could have draped himself in gold chains, or ridden a motorcycle bought with drug money, as his comrades in the trade did that day. Instead Terry went Yale: Yale sweat pants, Yale windbreaker and Yale baseball cap.

William Finnegan related this episode in just a few lines of his extraordinary portrait of the drug life in New Haven (''Out There,'' The New Yorker, Sept. 10 and 17), but it conveys the central fact of Terry's existence: He has virtually no connection at all to the state of the world before he was born. To him the word ''Yale'' is a designer label, like Armani, Gucci or Reebok.

Life was once different in Newhallville, the black section of New Haven where Terry lived until his grandmother threw him out for dealing drugs. Young men once dressed in white bucks and flannel jackets from J. Press and harbored secret longings for the life inside the ivied gates of Yale, just across town. Workers carried lunch pails to the Winchester Repeating Arms factory. Jobs still structured everyone's day.

This world died when the factories did. Now, too many people pass days moving from one cocaine purchase to another. Among these broken men and women are Terry's mother, aunts and uncle, all of whom have had grave bouts of cocaine addiction that have left them shaken and diminished.

Mr. Finnegan, a staff writer for The New Yorker, spent several months in New Haven, sketching Terry's life and giving the public a face it had not yet seen. Terry is sometimes violent, but in his world violence is a necessary currency. Still, his charm and grace and lack of guile are striking. There is a child in there somewhere, beneath the drug dealer, but he has had to invent himself in the only world he knows. The finished product is by turns engaging, terrifying, heartbreaking.

Terry's Yale outfit is a poignant historical mistake. When his homeboys applaud it, they miss its original meaning; it is to them as disposable as this season's fashion. As society battles increasing violence and hardness among such young men, it is also faces a fundamental loss of memory.

All the New Havens need to somehow recover the sense of the world as it once was, when a big blue ''Y'' meant something far more potent than the emblems on Gucci loafers and the gleaming motorcycles bought with cocaine money. BRENT STAPLES